It’s with a heavy heart, and immediate effect, we announce The Slaughtered Bird website will no longer be able to publish reviews, interviews, or press releases to help promote indie projects.

Over the last few months work commitments and other circumstances have meant there’s less and less time to spend updating everything. Plus, hosting costs are set to go up very soon, which was the final nail in the coffin.

I enjoyed my time writing for The Slaughtered Bird immensely. Chris Barnes, the site’s proprietor, was always professional, kind, and committed to producing quality content. I stopped writing for free outside of my author site for some time, but I stayed on board The Bird because it was a great place, full of good people. It’s possible that I’ll collate the pieces I wrote for The Bird and put them somewhere for posterity; in addition to the many, many horrible films I’ve watched, I did find some of my favorite movies of all time through the site.

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Atmo Horrox, my favorite movie of 2016, is finally coming to a streaming service near you! Check out the official movie site for details. Pick your adjective: weird, bizarre, trippy, strange, what-have-you, but it’s a film you really ought to see.

Because I hate myself and feel that I deserve to be punished, I reviewed the low-budget indie horror film At Granny’s House at The Slaughtered Bird:

The story’s about an old lady whose ass hole son hires a caretaker (I spelled “ass hole” with a space in the middle because it’s funnier that way), and said caretaker turns out to be a homicidal maniac. The caretaker is named Rebecca. The old lady is named Marion. She’s the “Granny” in the title, despite having no grandchildren. Yes, I know it’s a niggling detail. Nobody wants to watch a movie titled, At Old Lady With No Grandchildren’s House. Well, I didn’t want to watch a movie that was so poorly made, so we’re all suffering. Anyway, Rebecca has a case of the ass about rude people who spend a lot of time on their phones, so she sneaks into their room at night and murders them. Then she falls in love with a less-rude houseguest named Ted, played by writer/director Les Mahoney, and they become a murder couple together. With Granny/Not-Granny’s tacit approval.

The plot, stretched thinner across a 102-minute span than your mother’s threadbare Sunday knickers, involves a pair of scientist/CSI-types dropped into a forest and forced to live in geodesic dome-like structures while they set up cameras to study animal behavior and dirt in the wake of a mass murder committed by a Manson-like cult some time ago. I think. This may take place in the future, though it’s not certain. The main characters may have had a romantic relationship prior to the events of the movie, but it’s not certain. The cult may still be out there, but it’s not certain. What is certain is that the film doesn’t give you the slightest reason to care about what happens. We don’t know the stakes. We don’t know what’s really happening. We don’t know why. The only thing that isn’t ambiguous about this movie is my frustration with it.

For the rest of the review, including several other bon mots, click here!

Is it horror? Sort of, but it’s subtle and deep, and the protagonist Jack makes us feel every bit of it in a terrific performance. He’s tasked with cleaning out the basement and garage of the home he’s lived in since childhood, and hence must grapple with all the issues that entails. His absent brother, clearly loved, leaves an aching hole in the narrative that the viewer can’t help but fill, and that’s one of the movie’s greatest strengths: what it doesn’t say, what it doesn’t show.

I’ve whined before in this space about how reviewing books can be a terrible can of worms, particularly if you’re a writer yourself. Every positive review you write invites accusations of favoritism, and every negative review alienates the people in your own community.

So right now I’m going to have to alienate a whole bunch of writers, because I really didn’t care for Hardened Hearts. A horror anthology of short stories focusing on the theme of love, Hardened Hearts didn’t live up to the promise of its subject matter, and far too many of the stories within read as flat, leaden, and without affect.

Some books do it for you, and some don’t. Check out the rest of the review here.